What is Easter all about?

Easter is a holiday dedicated to the resurrection of Jesus. In short, Jesus was a man who lived about 2,000 years ago (we base our calendar off of his birth). Jesus did amazing things, and more importantly claimed to be God. He didn’t perform miracles and signs in the name of God, he performed miracles and signs of his own authority; thus, implying and highlighting his own divinity. He also went around saying he was God, and both the educated religious leaders as well as lay Jewish followers understood that he was in fact claiming to be God. As such, the religious leaders, who disagreed with Jesus and were upset at his criticisms of them, decided to have him killed for this blasphemous and outrageous claim that he is God. Afterall, a man who claims to be God but isn’t God is clearly disrespecting God, right?

So, Jesus was crucified on a Friday, what we celebrate as Good Friday, and he was entombed in a tomb belonging to member of the Sanhedrin Council, Joseph of Arimathea. Buried on a Friday, the Jews would have understood that following Sunday to be “the third day” after Jesus’s burial.

When a group of Jesus’s female followers went to go perform acts of respect and burial rituals on Jesus’s body the following Sunday, they discovered that the tomb was empty!

Following this discovery, the risen Jesus began appearing to more and more people, some who were his followers, and some who were not his followers. Most of those to whom he appeared definitely did not expect to see him ever again. This miraculous resurrection is confirmation that Jesus was in fact God, was confirmation of the many times he had prophesied over his own death and resurrection, and proof that Jesus had in fact meant what he said when he offered us eternal life. This resurrection, central to the Christian faith, is what Easter is all about.

Why did Jesus die?

A very fair question. After all, is Jesus was God, why did he die? Couldn’t he have used his God powers in order to smite his enemies and emerge victorious in dominating fashion?

The whole point of Jesu’s death, indeed the whole point of his life and resurrection as well, was the forgiveness of our sins. We are sinful people. It doesn’t take a religious man to look around and realize that something about this world is not as it ought to be, and that something about humans is not as we ought to be. This disconnection between what we are as people, and what we were supposed to be as people is sin. We constantly mess up, make mistakes, do the morally wrong thing. Sometimes in a big way, sometimes in a small way. C.S. Lewis once said “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good”. This trying very hard to be good, but still struggling with being bad and messing up, is sin. And it is evidence of how deep our problem goes.

To put it simply, sin = evil. Sin = not good.

However, there is hope! A God who could allow evil to go unpunished wouldn’t be much of a God at all, at the very least he would be an unjust God, at worst he would be wicked and cruel. All this evil, horrible sadness we see regularly, and there’s a God up there just letting it all slide? That doesn’t sound so good. That leaves us with another problem though. If God is a just God, and punishes evil as a right and good judge would do, then surely he will not pass me over. I can’t imagine that I would escape God’s judgement. It is an uncomfortable thought, but the reality is I know I’ve messed up.

So God looked at us and knows that sin and evil cannot be tolerated, yet he loves us, and didn’t create us to punish us, but to love and be with us. So instead, God decided to come down in a human, namely Jesus. Jesus lived a perfect, clean, right, sinless life. Absolute moral perfection. Then, at the end of his life, he surrenders himself to judgement in the form of crucifixion, condemnation, and death.

By freely surrendering himself, yet possessing every power to act to the contrary, Jesus was punished for sin he did not commit. The purpose of this punishment was that, through faith in Jesus, that death is carried out on your behalf. Essentially, God traded places with us in this moment. He gives us his righteousness, and we give him our sin. God says, through faith in Jesus, your sins will be washed away that you may live as you were created to; eternal relationship with him.

This is the hope! That through faith in Jesus, even though we have a huge sin problem, Jesus makes an even bigger payment on our behalf. Becoming man, he is now able to foot the bill for us, being God, his “footing the bill” is worth infinity, meaning nothing we could possibly put on this tab will outweigh the payment Jesus has put down. Because Jesus wanted so badly for us to be in eternal relationship with him, he was willing to voluntarily lay his life down in this manner.

Why did Jesus rise from the dead?

Sin was a barrier between us and God, between us and an eternal relationship with God. We weren’t created to live 80 years then cease to exist. Beautifully, God created us so intentionally and purposefully; for close, intimate relationship with him forever. For all eternity.

For us to live with God for all eternity, clearly something has to be done about death. After all, it seems pretty certain that one day we will all die, which feels pretty contradictory with the idea of eternal life.

By being raised from the dead, Jesus proves that life does not end with physical death. He proves that through faith in him, and with complete forgiveness of sins, we will in fact continue to live in relationship with Jesus for all eternity.

That is why he rose from the dead, to prove that he is actually God, and that through faith in him and his sacrifice, physical death is no longer the end of the line for us either. For if we do get Christ’s righteousness as he gets our sins, then we also get his resurrection from the dead.

Lewis, C. S. (2009). Mere Christianity. Harper Collins.